Federal Labor has long had quotas in place and nearly half of all the party's MPs are women.

But both Dr Nahan and Ms Harvey this week again ruled out the adoption of quotas to help get more women into the WA Parliament.

Women snubbed in blue-ribbon seats

Dr Nahan argued having quotas would be difficult because of the Liberals' "grassroots" preselection system, which allows individual branches to select candidates.

Instead of adopting a systemic intervention, he has chosen a more coercive approach to fix the problem.

Dr Nahan said he, Ms Harvey and other party heavyweights continued to talk to every WA branch and division and "urged them, encouraged them and lobbied them to give a weight to gender balance in the selection of candidates" as they head towards to the next state poll in 2021.

Both the Cottesloe and Wentworth scenarios appear to show Liberal preselectors don't take kindly to being urged by their party leaders to consider women, and won't shy away from publicly slapping them down if they attempt to do so.

In the fallout from both Cottesloe and Wentworth, both Dr Nahan and Mr Morrison backed the final decisions of preselectors and talked up the quality of the triumphant male candidates.

An impassioned quota call ignored

For the Liberals, the timing of the Wentworth preselection could not have been worse.

The party is already fracturing on a number of fronts, including over claims from within about its poor treatment of women and concerns about gender imbalance.

"There are an equal number of meritorious women out there in the real world as there are men, but they won't come if the barriers to entry and mountains to climb are too high," she said.

Recent experience shows that the coercion and lobbying of Liberal preselectors by the party's leaders is failing to get more women preselected into winnable seats.

The male and female Liberals calling for gender quotas are acutely aware that, until a more interventionist approach is taken, the party will remain out of step with community expectations about gender balance, and as such will struggle to increase its female vote.